Even fish-based television shows aren't exempt from the reality show controversy parade.
The Discovery Channel's increasingly popular show The Deadliest Catch is getting some fire for some creative editing they did on the season premiere. They showed a dangerous storm (not sure if it was "perfect," but it was bad) in the Bering Sea, and the fight the crew had to keep the boat afloat and stay alive. Now comes word that the storm footage was from October, the flooding of the boat happened in September, and extra footage was shot to tie the scenes together to make it look like everything happened around the same time.
The Hollywood Reporter did some detective work and found the production outline for the episode, and things just don't add up. They've placed video of the episode on their web site. For the record, producers of the show say the outline was only an early draft and they don't do reenactments (though they also say that footage from different days is sometimes used).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-18-2008 @ 2:57PM
tbville said...
who cares, the show is still good and what are they faking, some water in the bottom of the boat, oh no, it still happened.
go bother the hills if you want to look at fake tv shows
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4-18-2008 @ 7:22PM
Pinkcrab said...
You know, it just irritates me that there are people out there that just love to pick apart DC. What I think a lot of people seem to forget that in spite of all "stuff for television" they are doing a very dangerous job. And when they sail out each year there is a very real possibility that one of those boats will NOT come back. That out of those guys that we all love watching, SOME might not be with us and their families. It's a sobering fact!
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4-18-2008 @ 3:37PM
Oreo said...
Maybe the episode where a boat sank and killed 3 of the 4 crewmen was faked too, I mean give me a break.
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4-18-2008 @ 3:51PM
Andrew said...
It's about as fake as pro wrestling!!!1!
/sarcasm
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4-18-2008 @ 5:28PM
Scott Schrantz said...
It was obvious while watching the show that they were using footage from two different days, spliced together. No big deal. They wanted an establishing shot of the boat in rough water, and they found one. What's the next big controversy that's going to be unearthed? That one time on Survivor when they showed footage of a snake while somebody was talking, but the footage of the snake was from three weeks earlier? Scandal!
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4-18-2008 @ 9:57PM
Bash said...
I didn't like the season premiere because it basically was the season premiere of last year again. I think people started picking on this because they felt cheated. The whole incident with the boat sinking was last year. Why did they have to warm that one up again? To put it into perspective? So that new viewers can catch up?
I think they did that with the re-runs of almost every episode before they started airing season 4. That guy in the helicopter was and his rescue was dragged out over three episodes in season 3 already, why did they have to dig up his footage again?
The problem for me is that they are trying to sensationalize this too much. It IS dangerous alright but you don't have to plaster footage you got to this extent if you as me. They also showed the guy again who was rescued by one of the boats. I was fully ready to see that footage again where the guy on the boat that was pushed to shore 20 years ago - the one who was then pushed into the ice shelf covered sea and managed to survive.
It's become like watching Nascar and being shown the same crash over and over and over again and I started feeling like a vulture watching the season 4 premiere to be honest. They already added footage of someone getting hit in the head by the end of a crane and I bet my fat ass that this is footage we will see in episode 10 earliest in its full extend with the half-second fast-cut version every second episode from now on until then. It's simply getting too sensational. As if we can hardly wait to see somebody die. As if that's the only thing we could be interested in.
They also started upping the ante on the "let's put something at the end of one of the buoys"-schtick. They put garbage into one of the boxes before, they welded one shut and now they put a car at the end of one. And if you ask me they didn't really report on what was really a fact out there - that thing simply was in the way. That thing was dragged to sea because of the cameras. That IS a problem. On the one boat they managed to get a whole car on - on the other they were so dumb to forget a cup o noodles even though it supposedly is a tradition - if it was so important how could they forget THAT one?
Honestly there was so much that simply felt like "Could you do that for us?" - like the biting into a fish which was also supposedly a tradition on the Hansen boat - so if it was why didn't we see it before? The last time it was a DARE. Not a tradition. To me it seemed as if they had some clowns on doing silly tricks for the camera.
I know it sounds silly but what does it for me is high crab counts. I could watch them dragging up high counts a gazillion times.
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